A social networking service is an online service, platform, or service that focuses on building and reflecting social networks or social relations among people, who, for example, share interests and/or activities. A social network service typically includes a representation of each user (often a user profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web-based and provide means for users to interact over the Internet, such as via posts, e-mail, and instant messaging. Social networking services allow users to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within their individual networks.
The main types of social networking services are those that contain category places (such as former school year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages), and a recommendation system linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with Facebook®, LinkedIn®, Google+®, and Twitter® services widely used worldwide, The Sphere (The Luxury Network®), Nexopia® (mostly in Canada); Bebo®, VKontakte, Hi5®, Hyves (mostly in The Netherlands), Draugiem.lv (mostly in Latvia), StudiVZ (mostly in Germany), iWiW (mostly in Hungary), Tuenti® (mostly in Spain), Nasza-Klasa (mostly in Poland), Decayenne, Tagged®, XING, Badoo® and Skyrock® services in parts of Europe; Orkut® and Hi5® in South America and Central America; and Mixi®, Multiply®, Orkut®, Wretch, Renren and Cyworld® services in Asia and the Pacific Islands and Facebook®, Twitter®, LinkedIn® and Google+® services are very popular in India and Pakistan.
Social networking services share some conventional features. Most often, individual users are encouraged to create profiles containing information about themselves. Users can often upload pictures of themselves to their profiles, post blog entries for others to read, search for other users with similar interests, and compile and share lists of contacts. In addition, user profiles often have a section dedicated to comments from friends and other users. To protect user privacy, social networks usually have controls that allow users to choose who can view their profile, contact them, add them to their list of contacts, and so on. Of course social networking services may provide various additional features.
The popularity and population of social networking service such as Facebook® has experienced an astronomical growth in recent years, reaching close to one billion online users and ever increasingly connected. Unfortunately, it might also be a lucrative and prime target for hackers and cyber criminals to install malicious software on a user's computer. Currently, most malicious software is delivered to a user's machine through social networking sites. Typically, a user's computer is infested by merely clicking on a malicious URL, or by authorizing a malicious application to access the user's personal data.
These malicious applications spread through social networking sites because more people are using the sites and users trust that a friend would not provide links to or otherwise share malicious applications. A user who unknowingly installs such applications tends to get infested and spread their infestation widely across their network of friends or connections. However, many applications go to the extent of obtaining chat permissions for maliciously posting URLs to friend's chat area or wall.